Ice, ice baby

Just do it!”

It used to be Nike’s slogan, but  now,  all my    friends are crowing for me to do it.  What’s it?

Freeze my eggs.

“Everyone is doing it,” my persuasive friend from London who I’ll call Stella says, “As in everyone.” Then she puffs her cigarette at me and I almost choke. Cigarettes, by the way, cause infertility, I point out. I told her I was one step ahead already by quitting smoking.

Stella has gone through the very expensive and very painful round of freezing her eggs.  I’ve seen her stab herself and I must say the gore is Law and Order SVU levels.  She says it adds to her desirability to be a wife because she can have 35-year-old eggs even if she’s a 40-year-old wife.

Call me old-fashioned, but right now, that kind of reasoning is bizarre for me.  But, yeah, I get it. Fine.

A woman is free to choose to do what she wants with her body. On a physical and existential level, freezing my eggs is just not for me right now. Although there are times I feel I should just drink Kool-Aid. Regret is a word I often hear when I say “No way.”

It’s baby fever!

In our teens and 20s, it’s all about how not to get pregnant. Today, it’s water cooler talk. How to get knocked up! I look at my Instagram feed and it’s 50-percent babies, 20-percent food, 30-percent selfies. No more handbags and shoes! Unless you’re following Vogue, Rachel Zoe, and Ingrid Go.

Little humans are the “it” thing. Hot moms are now the new “it” girls, like Jackie Antonio, Stephanie Gonzalez, Hindy and Kat Tantoco, Bianca Elizalde, and Amanda Jacob.  Even Carine Roitfeld put babies on the inaugural issue of CR.

I’m not kidding, but the guys who I’ve either dated or who have hit on me lately have gone from “Hey, Baby” to “I want to have a baby.”

I actually had someone send me a what’s app message, “I want you because you’re fertile.” He was not drunk, unfortunately. 

I’m not going to lie. I see my best friends with their children and I’m just over the moon for them. And yes, the mothers are so hot that the acronym MILF needs a revamp. Stifler’s mom is so far gone.

I’ve always fancied myself as immature. Now I feel old. Not just “let’s have Fraxel” old but doomsday old. Stella tells me, “It’s all downhill after 35.”

And she’s right. It is. I do realize my days as a young and hot mom are really passing me by. Not to mention health concerns and if that kid is having my “colorful” genes, then I must have the odds on my side.

Listen, I’m still trying to find a way to max out my cards, while my friends are now forming real families. When the kid is not around, all they want to do is sleep. I’m developing abandonment issues, all over again.

I’m not going to lie. Of course, I want to settle down, have a routine, and fight with that person every Tuesday over who walks the dog. I want a nice, real relationship, maybe even a marriage, as much as the next sap.  I’ve accomplished a couple of things that saves me from being branded as a total loser. So in that sense I feel okay with myself. I’m okay to want these things. This is not a portrait of low self-esteem.  I tell myself I don’t need to have it all … right now.  But then, yes you do feel like you need to cross over. Already.

I’ve seen my happy friends. They are actually happy. Very happy people. But then, I also see the flipside. The young hot wife with hot baby trapped with douche/loser/prick. Or worse, the ones who compromise out of fear of being alone.

Now my situation is not that delicate, but a lot of the guys I’ve gone out on dates with are mostly high-functioning over-achieving individuals who have recently felt their mortality. They like girls my age because of that fertility thing.

Being type A, they are quite upfront about it. It’s like a Power point presentation. Here’s the sales pitch: I have connections to really good pre-schools in New York or London, boarding schools in Switzerland, I’m over strip clubs, I’m old, I’ve worked hard for 20 years, I’m ready to work at home and, as one of them actually told me, “if you behave,” then let’s do it!

Behave I didn’t! Is this the future for my age group? My age box? Whatever happened to roses? Now, they’re using zygotes for romance. Talk about a bundle of joy. Of course, not all of these losers want to have kids. Some of them just pepper the baby word around like a dangling carrot. As I said, it has officially become a pick-up line.

Then in Gstaad, while dancing at GreenGo during a Le Rosey alumna party (not a student party), I meet a 21-year-old guy. He’s in a bad mood.  He proceeds to tell me that he’s so over the Gstaad scene (what scene? It’s either kids in school, really old people or worse… families that I don’t belong in over there) and feels like he needs to go somewhere warm like the Bahamas to find himself. Then he says, “I hate babies.”

Just like that! Unprovocated.

I ask him why and he says, “They’re just everywhere. I was in business class and there was this baby losing it and I couldn’t sleep.” Then he goes on and on with Nicky Minaj in the background on how everyone uses them as a trophy and that wanting them seems a little provincial. Wow. What happened to this guy?

“Do boys like you actually pick up girls like me having that kind of philosophy in life?” I ask him.

“I feel bad for you guys. I’ve seen the pressure,” he says without skipping a beat, “Want a drink?”

Then I feel another kind of old. Cougar old. I mean he feels sorry for me? Dizzy from the fondue kirsch, I take what ’s left of my dignity and tell him that he shouldn’t feel sorry for me.

“This is what you should feel sorry for,” I say and proceed to do the running man right in front of him.

The mid-30s single girl is now the new 40-year-old starter wife divorcee. The pity party has moved to us.  Maybe the world is going back to its old traditions. Nuclear families are back again. See the whole family vibe trend in ads like Tommy Hilfiger?

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s wonderful that most of my friends are so wholesome. I love that Modern Family is such a hit TV show. I love that kids can now wear Dior with no irony at all. The fashion world has embraced them.

Then I remembered something from a couple of years ago. In a family gathering honoring my deceased grandmother on my mother’s side, I did have some sort of a catharsis. My mother’s sister has five kids, and all of them have children. They stood as a collective as they said words of remembrance for my grandmother who passed away. They were so many of them.

Then it was our side. My mother stood along with me and my brother. Just us, even my mom was single at that moment.  My dad had to go home because of a stomachache. Was this our family’s future? I asked my mom that maybe her Chihuahuas, Bruno and Tinee, should join us. Power in numbers.

I knew I had to be Isaac. I was the sacrifice. I mean our family can’t just end here!

Then after all that noise, you get the good old reassuring maxim that the universe tells you when all is silent: All in good time.

That’s right. All in good time. Great! So for now, good times as always.